Friday, November 13, 2015

iPad Pro with pencil stylus review

Summary: Overall, the whiteboarding alone is reason enough for
me to buy an iPad pro-- it has gone over that magic threshold of "good
enough" that pads of paper will be a thing of the past for me. Your excuse may be different (pencil drawing is a good one), so I think this device will be huge.

Dave Hart and Grue Debry got an iPad Pro with stylus for their company and they loaned it to me to try out tonight. I used their limnu shared whiteboarding program to test it.

I tried it with the math I was messing with today (trying to meet Andrew Glassner's color space challenge to get uniformity into the prismatic color volume).

First, I **love** that I can rest my hand on the iPad while I draw (the iPad pro understands not to count that as a touch).

My hand is resting on the iPad as I draw and this is more important to my comfort than I would have thought

My biggest reaction was that this iPad is exactly the size I want. It's about the size of 8.5 by 11 paper (actual working area size about 7 3/4" by 10 1/4"), so maybe that size evolved in paper to be the "right size" or maybe I am just so used to it that I like it. Any bigger and it would be awkward to transport, and using this as a pad in a coffee shop is a great use case. And of course you can pan so really it's a window into a much bigger sheet of paper.

The stylus is fantastic. It feels good and has some features that has me not as eye-rolling about calling it a pencil.

As a white board marker I loved it. Changing colors and nib sizes was more useful than I anticipated. Using it as an eraser (which I had to do a lot as will be evident in some of the not very careful eases below-- I really do use limnu like a white board-- it's for blazing through ideas). Here's my first screenful.

15 more 2x2 equations to solve (doing them as special cases to take advantage of zero dropouts) so I will definitely need the pan feature. I used to use a big real white board or a giant artist pad for these situations, but I will most definitely use a tablet from now on. Even without the saving and collaboration features I think it would be a win just because of physical portability and fluidity.